In Matthew 27:64, the Pharisees and chief priests ask Pilate for security for Jesus' tomb, because if his disciples started claiming that he had risen from the dead, then "this last deception would be worse than the first." Therefore, there is something very significant about the fact that Jesus not only died, but was raised to life. Something that threatened the Pharisees (and by Pharisees, I mean all the religious leaders of Israel at the time).
But before we talk about the "last deception", let's talk about the first. Let's examine what the Pharisees might have seen in Jesus that was deceptive.
The Pharisees were convinced that Jesus was a lawbreaker, despite the fact that they could never prove it. That view tainted everything he said. He even had the nerve to tell them publicly, to their faces, that not only was he not a lawbreaker, but that they were. So they hated him. They didn't believe him. Believing him would have caused them to lose face. And because Jesus was "wrong" about them, nothing he said could be believed. This is the first deception: that Jesus knew more about God and the Law than the Pharisees, chief priests, and teachers of the law.
But even that was not the worst part of the "first deception". The worst part came when Jesus explained why he knew more than they did. He claimed to be the Son of God, which, as explained in John 5:18, was the same as claiming to be equal with God. We know this to be true, but the Pharisees saw it as an outrage. They killed him for it, and tried to erase the deception of the populace by mocking him and daring him to prove it once he was, in their eyes, powerless.
And yet, the claim and "deception" that Jesus made to be King of the Jews, the ultimate authority and judge of right and wrong, was not as great a threat than the claim that he could rise from the dead.
So what was it about the resurrection that was so threatening?
His resurrection is what made a national witness a global proclamation. It proved that he had been in control of his own life the whole time, that he had given it up willingly. Anybody can claim that the people who capture, convict, and kill them don't actually have the power. But if anybody but Jesus had said it, they would have had to back up the statement by coming down from the cross before they died, because their control over the situation would end in death. Not so with the Son of God.
1 Corinthians 15:12-22 explains that without the resurrection of Jesus Christ, our faith would be "futile" and our preaching "useless". Verse 19 says, "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, than we are to be pitied more than all men."
Why would our faith be "futile" and our preaching "useless" without the resurrection of Jesus Christ? Because it is because of the resurrection that our hope is not in death, but in life. I like to say that Jesus died to defeat sin, and he rose again to defeat death. That is true, but not a complete reason.
The resurrection proved that the cross was not a defeat, but a victory. It gave his disciples new hope and boldness, because the threat of death was no threat at all anymore. It means that whatever pain we go through in this life will end in our death, and we will live forever with new life. That is the power of the resurrection. That was the threat of the resurrection. The threat was not in the "deception," but in the possibility of people believing the witness, and what those people would be able to do. What we can do. Anybody can deny that the cross was an act of God, but nobody can deny that of the resurrection.
